Storage Nation

Those of you who subscribe to Gartner reports may have seen their recent report: “ Choosing Between Monolithic Versus Modular Storage: Robustness, Scalability and Price Are the Tiebreakers ” While I agree with some of their definitions of monolithic and modular storage, it is no longer a question of one versus the other. With the Hitachi USP V/VM we combine the best of both worlds, by providing a “monolithic” or enterprise tier 1 front-end with lower cost modular back-end storage. I agree with their description of monolithic storage as having many controllers that share direct access to a large, high performance, global cache, supporting a large number of host connections, including mainframes, and providing redundancy to ensure high availability and reliability. I also agree with their definition of modular storage, which contains two variants, a dual controller architecture with separate cache memory and a scale out architecture that can have many nodes with separate caches in each node.

Last week Hitachi Data Systems held their first blogger day, which was attended by 10 bloggers who cover the IT space.

Full Time Employee (FTE) per TB used to be a measure of productivity for storage managers. Some people still use that metric today. I submit that FTE per TB is no longer relevant today. For the last 10 years the mantra for IT has been “do more with less”

Five Requirements for Storage Virtualization In my previous blog, I identified the following requirements for Storage Virtualization. The first two requirements were already identified by SNIA in 2001. The additional three requirements are addressed by Hitachi in our implementation of Storage virtualization in the USP V/VM. These five requirements are: 1

Next week many of us in the storage industry will be heading out to Orlando Florida for the Storage Networking World . Storage conference which is jointly sponsored by Computerworld and SNIA, the Storage Networking Industry Association.  This is the world’s largest event for IT executives/mangers, vendors, channel partners, press and analysts involved in storage and data systems.    This is a great place to meet your peers in the storage industry, exchange best practices, hear the latest vendor updates, participate in workshops, and quickly gather information about the latest developments in the industry. One of the highlights for me is to get an update on the SNIA work around SMI-S, the Storage Management Initiative Specifications

Paula Sequeira, posted This comment on my post on New Considerations for Tiered Storage .

I was out of pocket last week supporting the EBC on the Road in Sweden. Kenneth Chang, who managers our Executive Briefing Centers in Sefton Park, UK and Santa Clara, California, recruits our executives to spend a week doing briefings for companies in locations outside of our EBCs so that we can get closer to our customers and prospects.  This has been helpful for many companies who have had to cut back on their travel expenses. Unlike other briefing centers that are staffed by dedicated presenters, our EBC briefings are done by product managers and executives who have direct responsibility for the products and solutions that they present

February 14 marks the start of the Chinese New Year, Year of the Tiger. This year it happens to fall on Valantine’s Day.  Here is a greeting, wishing you all the best for this New Year From the Folks at Hitachi Data Systems

While Cloud computing is touted as a new way to mask the complexity of the IT infrastructure and provide IT services as “a pay as you grow” service, these concepts  were introduced over 10 years ago with the service providers of the late 1990’s. These concepts were so appealing that they helped to fuel the dot com boom,  but disappeared in the dot com crash of 2001/2002. What has changed to make us think that a shared services model like cloud computing and cloud storage will be successful this time around? Key to the success of cloud storage providers, as with the dot com storage services providers (SSP) of earlier days, will be the ability to leverage their resources and be more efficient in managing the growth of storage compared to their end users.

Happy NewYear and welcome to 2010! I wish you all a healthy and productive new year. While the economy seems to be getting better, budget planners are still very cautious and so we will continue to see a drive to consolidate to reduce cost and thin down the fat to be more agile. Therefore data center virtualization will be a top priority for 2010.  We have already seen the adoption of server virtualization platforms with more competitive offerings and faster more powerful processors and networks becoming mainstream. The next major step in data center consolidation will be in the consolidation of storage through thin provisioning.